Rgr Wide i thought you worked with aeronautical flow devices such as airfoils, wings anything that dealt with aerodynamic pressure and the related aircrafts bodily surfaces. I see you work with mostly systems, weapons systems, aircraft internal systems. You ever design anything like weapons targeting avionics, or internal cockpit pilot sensors and subsystems?
I was wondering what does the average work day go like in something like that?
A typical day is less than exciting. R&D work can be a challenge, but like any type of engineering, there's the associated documentation. This includes design studies, detailed drawings, ECNs, release sheets, test procedures and many other uninspiring tasks. For every fun task, there are 10 boring ones to mitigate that brief interlude with job satisfaction. It can be a grind.
Satisfaction comes when your hardware performs in the field exactly as intended. For example, we designed and manufacture a cryogenic system and a separate impact sensor for the Standard Missile-3. You probably recall that this was the missile that recently took down that broken spy satellite. It's a hoot when the hardware does something on the cutting edge.
You may recall the two space probes sent out about 8 years ago by NASA. One was named Genesis and the other Stardust. You may recall that Genesis crashed in Utah when its recovery parachute failed to open. The reason it failed to open was that the reentry sensor was installed backwards. The same Lockheed Martin facility that built Genesis also built Stardust. So, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were very concerned that the same mistake was made in Stardust (you can read about Stardust at
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html).
So, we had NASA, JPL and Lockheed Martin Space Systems people up the wazoo. They came to our facility and we programed our centrifuge (an extremely sophisticated machine) to duplicate the reentry forces expected to be seen. After a solid week of test runs including testing (including testing with the sensor in a capsule of liquid nitrogen), it was concluded that if the sensor was properly installed, they would get a good chute. The fact that they were relying on a single sensor (a commercial grade component I designed in 1991) astounded me... It was exposed to 7 years in deep space, traveled 4.5 billion miles and a $340,000,000 satellite's survival depended upon our device. On January 15, 2006 Stardust entered earth's atmosphere. After a few minutes of coms blackout, a burst of telemetry showed a rate of descent indicating that the main parachute canopies were deployed. Our sensor did its job and NASA's program manager looked like the weight of the world was lifted. I should mention that we also provided the sensors that operated the comet dust collection system (sensing deceleration associated with entering the dust trail).
Even wiki addresses the Genesis blunder:
"A 16-member NASA Genesis Mishap Investigation Board (MIB) was quickly formed, including experts on pyrotechnics, avionics, and other relevant specialties. The MIB started its work on September 10, 2004 when it arrived at Dugway Proving Ground. It determined that all scientific hardware meant to be curated by the Johnson Space Center could be released and were not needed for the work of the board. Both JPL and Lockheed Martin began to prepare flight data and other records for the MIB.
It was announced on September 23, 2004 that the capsule, having had the science material extracted, would be moved to the Lockheed Martin Space Systems facility near Denver, Colorado, for MIB use.
A first possible root cause of the failed deployment of the parachutes was announced in an October 14 press release. Lockheed Martin had built the system with an acceleration sensor's internal mechanisms wrongly oriented, and design reviews had not caught the mistake. The intended design was to make an electrical contact inside the sensor at 3 g (29 m/s), maintaining it through the maximum expected 30 g (290 m/s), and breaking the contact again at 3 g to start the parachute release sequence. Instead, no contact was ever made.[6]
The same general parachute concept was also used on the Stardust comet sample return spacecraft, which landed successfully in 2006; that system was said not to have Genesis' flaw.
Shortly after the spacecraft crashed, it was pointed out that Colin Pillinger, part of the science team analysing the collected samples, was also the Principal Investigator for the ill-fated Beagle 2 mission to Mars. It had been suggested that the cause of Beagle 2's loss (which is as yet undetermined) might also have been due to a parachute failure. The determination of the cause of Genesis's parachute failure rules out any link between the two failures.
The chair of the NASA investigation board, Michael Ryschkewitsch, noted that none of the stringent review procedures at NASA had picked up a mistake, saying, "It would be very easy to mix this up".
Some would consider it amusing to note that this mishap is an instance of Murphy's Law that is classic in a most literal sense: After all, the incident causing Edward A. Murphy, Jr. to phrase his now so famous law, was exactly thisan accelerometer installed backwards.[7] On January 6, 2006, Ryschkewitsch revealed that a pre-test procedure on the craft was skipped by Lockheed Martin, and added that the test could have easily detected the problem."
Yeah, we get to do neat stuff.
I work for the Aerodyne Controls division of Circor Aerospace...
http://www.circoraerospace.com/My regards,
Widewing
